


The Blue Hour

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Angst, F/F, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 10:57:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3206651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Skyler thinks about the weight of the money piled up in the storage unit, wondering how much it would take to suffocate a person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Blue Hour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toastpiercer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toastpiercer/gifts).



“On his fifty-first birthday,” says Skyler, comfortably drunk, “I tried to drown myself.”

She’s sitting with her feet tucked up underneath her in an armchair in Lydia’s hotel room. It’s always the same room, the one at the end of a hallway on the fifth floor, the one closest to the fire exits; Lydia simply needs it to be the same room each time. It strikes Skyler as a slight vulnerability of hers, like the soft white curve of her back just before she slips into her blouse, or the look she gets in her eyes whenever Skyler’s hands are in her hair. Lydia has been counting money with a soft percussive sound, arranging stacks of bills in perfect rows, nearly as orderly as a machine, but at Skyler’s last words she stops, holding ten thousand dollars a few inches above the tabletop.

“You tried to kill yourself,” Lydia clarifies. Her voice is a little tight around the edges, as if Skyler's touched on something uncomfortably personal. She can never talk to Lydia for very long without running up into one boundary or another, but she doesn't mind; it gives her a kind of breathing space she doesn't have with anyone else.

“No,” Skyler says. “Not that. At the time, it just seemed like the only thing to do.”

She exhales, a laugh with all the humour sucked out of it.

“Of course, it only made things worse,” she continues. “He threatened to have me put away.”

“Are you telling me you want to talk about your options?” Lydia asks, delicately, setting the banknotes down.

“Are you talking about killing him like those men in prison?” Skyler asks, turning the wine glass around by its stem, enjoying its weight in her hand. Lydia’s flinch gives her away. Sometimes Skyler wonders how she’s managed to survive so long, doing what she does; she’s so easy to read that it almost hurts. 

At first, Skyler opened herself up to Lydia— who did, indisputably, know what she was doing, and had been at it for years— hoping to learn whatever secrets there might be that could keep her alive and sane. She wanted the playbook; she wanted the self-help guide. _Marriage and Organised Crime_. _Living With A Drug Dealer: Real-World Strategies For A Safer Home_. She knows now that first of all she’s beyond help, and second of all, there’s nothing mysterious about Walt’s business. It’s just a lot of people making grotesque amounts of money and killing each other when negotiations break down, and in the background, a lot of accounting. A lot of logistics. The principles at play are basic. If she wasn’t so terrified, she would be bored.

 

It’s all academic, of course. They can’t kill him, because just the thought of it keeps Skyler awake at night and Lydia’s already backed herself into a corner trying to keep Walt and her buyers and nameless other parties from killing _her_. So, for now, Skyler manages the car wash, keeps two parallel sets of books, and meets Lydia every week to receive the money and have her accounts cross-checked, and the time she spends with Lydia helps her get through the rest of the week without screaming herself hoarse.

“Is that new perfume?” Walt asks, one night. He’s too close. She feels stubble on her bare shoulder and forces herself not to flinch.

“I thought I’d try it out,” Skyler says. She thought she’d press Lydia up against the hotel room wall this time, her hair tangling in the top button of Skyler’s blouse, her rapid breaths muffled against Skyler’s neck, her shoulders pinned a few inches left of the fire alarm. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. She drove home in an aura of Lydia’s perfume, soothing herself with thoughts of finding out wherever it is Walt cooks these days and burning it to the ground. She can still feel Lydia clinging to her for dear life, leaving tiny crescent imprints in her skin.

“Mm. I like it.”

 

Sometimes she thinks about Lydia in her office in some tall, brilliant building in Houston, calculating and editing and fabricating until her thirty per cent cut merges seamlessly with her six-figure salary. Sometimes she thinks about the weight of the money piled up in the storage unit, wondering how much it would take to suffocate a person.

 

Thunderstorms close in, flights are cancelled, Lydia’s stuck in Albuquerque for another night, and Skyler finds her pacing and hyperventilating. She’s unplugged all the lamps in the room, in case lightning should strike the building, and all that’s left is a dim glow from the recessed light above the bathtub. She has a frantic, feverish look about her, teeth bared, pupils blown. Her eyes are so wide that Skyler can see white all around the irises.

“I want out,” she stammers, nearly as soon as Skyler locks the door. “I can’t do this any more. I want out.”

In the beginning, she envied Lydia, who has never worn a wedding ring and has only one child, a daughter too young to ask difficult questions. Lydia controls the flow of millions of dollars and could fly anywhere in the world if she wanted to. Skyler can drive the same loop of highway over and over and go back home to a house she’s poisoning one cigarette at a time, and if she’s lucky her son will talk to her and her husband won’t sneer. Seeing Lydia like this, trapped in a dark room by her own paranoia and so frightened she can barely speak, Skyler envies her a little less.

“Is that why you called me?” Skyler asks, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, taking in the state of the room. Scattered papers, furniture pushed away from the walls, a pair of small shoes tucked underneath a chair, one tipped onto its side. She needn’t have asked; she can see that Lydia called because she was afraid she’d lose her mind if left alone any longer. “How long have you been here?”

Lydia just cups her hands over her mouth, trying to breathe, and Skyler guides her to the edge of the bed with a perverse rush of relief.

“Let me call Walt,” Skyler says. “I mean it. Just... just sit down and take a breath and I’ll get him to come out here, and we’ll get it over with…”

Lydia scoffs weakly, but doesn’t protest. She’s shivering like someone pulled from icy water, and as Skyler rubs slow circles between her shoulderblades she goes quiet and still, either calming down or just giving way to exhaustion.

“He needs you,” Skyler whispers. “You pull out, his operation will fold within a month. You know that.”

Dealing with distraught people makes Skyler calmer and colder, and some part of her that isn't yet worn down into submission believes that Walt could still be convinced, maybe, if she and Lydia apply pressure in exactly the right way. She finds a notepad and starts drawing up her plan of attack— _stress difficulty of laundering money earned to date._ ( _Diminishing returns?) Interpersonal strain_ — while Lydia rests behind her, folded up among the pillows at the head of the bed. She agreed to take a sedative but still won’t lie with her back to the door.

“I can’t just cut him off,” Lydia murmurs. “You know what would happen.”

Skyler strikes through _interpersonal strain_ , which is just a polite way of saying _look at what you’ve done to us_ , anyway. Best to keep it in business terms. Make it harder for Walt to convince either of them that they’re not thinking rationally. She’s afraid that Lydia’s right. She’s afraid, too, that if they don’t act right this instant, Lydia’s going to pull herself together, apologise for her momentary breakdown, and suggest that they carry on as if nothing had happened.

“This is what I’ve got so far,” says Skyler, placing the pad in front of her, although she's losing her nerve as quickly as it came. “Let me know if there’s anything I should add.”

Lightning floods the room again, and Skyler rests her hand on Lydia's arm just before she startles, trying to imagine what she'll tell Walt when she calls him, if she calls him at all.

"Okay," Lydia mutters, tracing the tip of her pen down Skyler's bullet points and scribbling something in the margins. "Okay..."

Skyler lies back and listens to her write, thinking of the unbearable weight of all that money, thinking of what it must have looked like when Gus Fring’s superlab went up in flames.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] The Blue Hour](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6100072) by [mightbeanasshole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightbeanasshole/pseuds/mightbeanasshole)




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